It’s the Gulf of Mexico! – Ep. 32

Ooo this has been a long time coming… We make it to SALTWATER! After leaving the freshwater of Lake Michigan and traveling 1300 miles down the rivers (Mississippi and all the rest!), we’ve made it to the Gulf of Mexico!

Finally it’s time to turn our motorboat back into a SAILBOAT. Before leaving Chicago, we unstepped our mast and shipped it south via truck to Turner Marine in Mobile, Alabama. Our mast arrived way before we did, and was waiting for us at the boatyard. We were very happy to discover it it survived its own journey without as much as a scratch.

P.S.S. For anyone who’s is interested or cares about video editing software…

We migrated from Adobe Premiere to Final Cut Pro on this episode. In short, that meant that this episode took a bit longer than exepected to produce since we were learning on the fly. There are also few things that are a little rougher than we’d hoped, but we’re already feeling and seeing the benefits of the switch. FCP is optimized to run efficiently on our laptops, while Adobe products absolutely burn through the batteries. While using our solar panels and living 100% off-grid for the past month, we quickly realized we couldn’t keep operating this way.

Now that we’ve got the first episode down, FCP is already feeling much more familiar. We’ll be able to edit more quickly and efficiently, because we’ve put an end to the unsustainable cycle of charging the computer for multiple hours to get an hour of editing in before having to start the charging cycle all over again. Whereas before we couldn’t edit video on the computer and charge it at the same time, and it would only last for a maximum of 1.5 hours while editing, now that we’ve switched to FCP we can charge and edit at the same time, and it lasts about 3+ hours. Huge improvement!